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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29962176">J41M3</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/catherineflowers/pseuds/catherineflowers'>catherineflowers</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst and Fluff and Smut, But a hopeful story, F/M, Love after an abusive relationship, Mechanic!Brienne, Musings on the nature of consent, Robot!Jaime, Some dark themes, Space AU, healing together, injury detail, sororicide</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-16 02:06:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>9,767</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29962176</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/catherineflowers/pseuds/catherineflowers</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Stranded on an abandoned science station, AI coding specialist Brienne Tarth and i-being J41M3 recover from their ordeal at the hands of Jaime's creator Dr Cersei.</p><p>What can they do to make them both feel more human?</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>62</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>175</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>J41M3</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarthiana/gifts">tarthiana</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>

</p><p>This was an unused prompt from the recent Smut Exchange that was proposed by tarthiana. I could not resist it!</p><p>The original plan was to keep it under 5k just as if it had been part of the exchange. It did, however, get a bit bigger than I intended.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p><p>Brienne’s forehead is tight. There’s a line between her brows.</p><p>Jaime stands to attention in the diagnostic chamber. Naked. Plugged in.</p><p>Brienne is doing things. Tweaking settings on her panelpad, testing nerve responses in Jaime’s skin. Chewing her lip.</p><p>Jaime chews his lip too, or tries to – there’s a facial expression that goes with chewing lips that he knows he doesn’t know. He doesn’t do the bite quite right either – not that nibble-and-drag of teeth on lip Brienne does. The narrowing of her eyes in concentration. The tilt of her left brow.</p><p>Cersei never did that. He needs to practice, more, to get it right. He’ll need that, if someone ever comes for them.</p><p>He shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Takes a deep breath. Sighs – it’s been five minutes since she spoke. This is the interval he is programmed to be bored at. To consider her rude for not speaking.</p><p>**</p><p>Brienne looks up. Jaime blows imaginary hair off his forehead.</p><p>Tuts and sighs again.</p><p>“Jaime, I said this would take a while.”</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>“Please. I can’t just implement this code without testing it.”</p><p>“So you said.”</p><p>“Please –”</p><p>“I <em>know</em>,” he says, rolling his eyes.</p><p>Oh. Has it been five minutes since she spoke? Jaime’s programmed to be bored in silence. Bored and rude and sarcastic, just like Dr Cersei. It was her who had written that part of his code.</p><p>**</p><p>“Will it work?” he asks. He’s been given sufficient attention for the boredom protocol to disengage now.</p><p>“I don’t know. Not for certain. I can’t see any immediate conflicts the code might cause but … it’s a big unknown.”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“Well, it will use a lot of nerve-memory. And I’m concerned about shunting so many systems to the background, even for a short while. It’s … well, I’ve never done it before. I don’t think anyone has.”</p><p>“Why not?”</p><p>Brienne looks around them, at the tanks that line the room, filled with floating dead-eyed prototypes in various states of construction. His brothers, Cersei used to call them. Brienne doesn’t like them; she feels like they are watching her. They are not. Some of them are barebones only, some of them bodies-in-white. Skinless. Hairless. Inert and inhuman.</p><p>Brienne doesn’t like the lab at all. It’s too closed-in, and there are too many bad memories here. If they didn’t need it, she’d have sealed it off, the way she did with the cargo bay, the crew lounge, Cersei’s quarters.</p><p>“Nobody has done any of this before,” she whispers.</p><p>Only Cersei, Jaime knows. Cersei is the only one to have made a man like him – there are no other men like him.</p><p>**</p><p>Brienne looks away. She can’t – she can’t look at <em>them</em> and then look at him.</p><p>But that is why doing this is important, she reminds herself. Jaime is <em>not</em> one of them, not one of those artificial corpses, their systems burnt out, and their minds gone blank – he is not. He is so much more than they are, so much more than Dr Cersei ever imagined her creation could be. Dr Cersei would not recognise Jaime now.</p><p>Even now, the thought of Dr Cersei’s displeasure makes Brienne cringe.</p><p>She would have hated the Jaime that Brienne has discovered, that excited boy she awoke when she wrote code that allowed him to taste things, the code that allowed him to smell things. To compare them, to appreciate them. To respond to them.</p><p>She would hate the Jaime who went through all the clothes left behind on the station, trying everything on. Who braids his hair because he likes the pull, who danced with Brienne while dressed in a beautiful green cocktail dress because he loved the way it felt when it moved. The way the fabric shimmered in the nightlights.</p><p>She would hate his paintings, great golden daubs on the walls of E Deck, excessive and vulgar. The painting he did of Brienne on the wall of her quarters, so lifelike the eyes glisten like they’re looking right into your soul.</p><p>She would have mocked the Jaime who lay on the deck for an hour last night. Because he likes the feel of cold plastic on his back, the vibration of the air systems in his teeth. She would have hated that Brienne had lain beside him, holding hands with him, so she didn’t miss the rest of the human race. So it didn’t feel so drowningly empty here that she even missed Dr Cersei.</p><p>Dr Cersei would have been so angry. She would have hurt them both. Punished them.</p><p>**</p><p>Inside his body, inside his system core, Jaime feels Brienne.</p><p>“Accessing i-being terminal J41M3,” he says involuntarily. “Write mode initiated.”</p><p>He used to hate this, even before he really understood what hating was. When Cersei used to do this to him, push wires into the ports at the back of his neck and make him speak without speaking, forcing her cold code into him, he used to hate it.</p><p>This is not <em>that,</em> though. It’s not what Cersei used to do.</p><p>Cersei used to tell him how to feel. Her code, or the code she’d forced Brienne to write, was orders and directives. It was guilt and punishment. It smothered him, squashed him, kept his mind running in ever-decreasing circles back to her.</p><p>
  <em>You should feel the way I feel. I hate this. This is what hate is – you must feel it too, for this thing. You should hate it so much you want to kill it and destroy it. For me. Always for me.</em>
</p><p>Brienne’s code is not <em>that </em>code. Brienne opens him up, lets him feel things, accesses sensations so he can experience them. Brienne’s code makes Jaime happy. It is big and sweet and open-armed.</p><p>
  <em>Share this with me. Enjoy the way I feel when you feel it with me. This is for you. I think you will love this! I know you will enjoy this! This might make you happy. Smile and laugh and be whoever you want to be with me.</em>
</p><p>Cersei invented him, he knew. Built him, on all that she had learnt from building his brothers. Cersei had engineered his systems and grown his skin and organs from the cloned tissue of her own body. No one had ever done that before, he has come to understand.</p><p>Probably now, no one ever will again.</p><p>He starts, and shivers. His skin breaks out into gooseflesh all over.</p><p>“What is that?” he asks. His skin does that when he is cold, of course. It’s skin. But <em>that</em> …</p><p>**</p><p>“A response test,” she tells him. “Looks like it works.”</p><p>She smiles, and he smiles too, a second later. Is it a real smile or one of those he does when he doesn’t know how to respond, so he copies her? Is it a smile she can trust? It looks so much like Dr Cersei’s smile.</p><p>“Well,” she says, looking back at the panelpad. Looking at Jaime. “All you need is the code.”</p><p>“All I need is the code,” he repeats—another thing he does when he’s not sure what to say. Jaime always fills a silence. Of course he does – he was designed to infiltrate. An uncomfortable silence makes people notice things.</p><p>“I guess I’d better actually write it, then.”</p><p>**</p><p>Cersei had made him part of her, but she had never given him his own self.</p><p>He thinks he is his own self now, as he follows Brienne through the deserted corridors of the station. As they call into the comms bay to scan for any vessels that might have ventured out this far, pausing while she turns some lights off, stopping as she tinkers with a valve in the wall that’s leaking steam.</p><p>He lives because of Cersei, it is true, but it is Brienne who wants to give him life.</p><p>A real life.</p><p>They go into the mess hall. Their breakfast plates are still there on the table they always sit at, even though they could sit anywhere they wanted – Brienne clears them away. She pokes around in the kitchen, careful to leave the door wide open so she can see him, so she doesn’t feel closed in, and brings him some food.</p><p>It is a green curry, steaming in a little plastic tray. Plump white grains of rice in one compartment, ready to be stirred into the sauce that sits in the other. This is meal #34 – this was meant to be eaten on a Friday, menu week 4. Neither of them care about the rotation any more, not now they are the only ones here. They eat what they feel like eating, even when it’s not the right day.</p><p>That had seemed like madness to them both in the first few weeks they were alone, like something that could unravel everything they knew. Once, Jaime had shouted at her for making a mistake with the meals and the days. And Brienne had apologised, ashen-faced and trembling, and taken their meals back to the kitchen. Thrown them away and made the correct ones. It had felt safer to do that, even with Cersei not there.</p><p>How long ago that seems now. They were so very very small then.</p><p>Brienne has her concentration face on, with that same wrinkle in her brow. Her teeth on her lip in between forkfuls of her curry. Jaime tries the face, watching himself in the back of a spoon. He doesn’t get it right.</p><p>Brienne’s free hand taps the panelpad. Her cheeks are flushed.</p><p>“What’s the matter?” he asks, putting down the spoon.</p><p>“Nothing!” she says, too quickly. Her eyes can’t seem to look into his eyes. Her voice is higher. She clears her throat. “This is … it’s just a difficult thing to write.”</p><p>He laughs, because laughing lightens the mood. It puts people at ease, and it makes them worry less. He loves it when Brienne laughs because her mouth is big and her teeth are broad and white and because he remembers the taste of them and he loves that memory. Very much.</p><p>**</p><p>It <em>is</em> difficult. Very difficult.</p><p>Brienne fidgets in her seat – how can <em>code</em> make her blush?</p><p>“You’re … embarrassed?” He’s peering at her with those too-green eyes, staring at every feature she has, trying to analyse them.</p><p>“I don’t know.” She sounds more irritable than she means to. More sad, as well. “Maybe.”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“Because all I have are my own experiences. Because the code will have to share them with you if you … if you are to … feel those things.”</p><p>Jaime blinks. He is silent for a moment, his face frozen in one position as he tries to think of what to say.</p><p>“This embarrasses you?” he asks after a moment.</p><p>“It’s very intimate.”</p><p>“Ah,” he nods. “<em>That</em> bothers you.”</p><p>Now it is Brienne’s turn to have no clue what to say. This is so loaded. So difficult. So filled with something that is most definitely shame.</p><p>“I won’t tell anybody. Not even when we leave.”</p><p>Brienne wants to cry. That’s the worst thing he could have said, though he means it to be comforting, she knows. It’s ridiculous anyway. What chance do they have of ever leaving here?</p><p>“That’s not what I mean. I mean … AI coding … it’s not something you just <em>do</em>. There are rules. Important rules. A code of ethics.”</p><p>“You said I am not an AI.”</p><p>“No, not in the traditional sense.” He isn’t. He is nothing like anything she ever worked on before. They were systems, mostly designed to anticipate human need, keep people company, or provide customer service. Jaime is a man. An actual, ambulatory, sentient <em>person</em>.</p><p>“Then your rules don’t apply.”</p><p>“I think perhaps they should apply <em>more</em>.”</p><p>“Why?”</p><p>“There are so many lines, and I just don’t know sometimes … Am I crossing those lines? Am I taking advantage? Am I pushing this on you? Do I have enough distance to do this objectively? I should … I should be doing this in a team, I should have input from multiple coders, I – I don’t even have the seniority to be leading a project like this, I –”</p><p>He leans back in his chair and pulls his long golden curls out of their bun. Smiles that louche smile that Dr Cersei smiled whenever she was about to be unfathomably cruel. It sends a shiver down Brienne’s spine. Chokes her breath, a little. “Brienne, it’s just sex.”</p><p>“There’s no ‘just’ about sex, Jaime! You don’t –”</p><p>“Isn’t that the point?”</p><p>“I – what?”</p><p>He shrugs. “I thought that was why you were doing this. You’re giving me a gift. I <em>can’t</em> see the big deal about it now because, for me, it’s just mechanical. But, Brienne, you’re coding me <em>pleasure</em> …”</p><p>His eyes grow so soft when he says that word that Brienne almost melts before him. Almost stands up and pulls him across the table, pulls him into her, pulls him against her. Gods, he’s so beautiful, so perfect and pretty and she needs him so much and they are the only thing each other has –</p><p>No. Gods, no. No no no no no. Dirty. Filthy. Shameful. To take from him like that right now would be –</p><p>He’s still talking.</p><p>“I won’t feel ‘just’ about sex then, will I? You’re giving me something that’s mine. For me. Cersei would never have done that.”</p><p>“No,” Brienne has to concede.</p><p>“Then, why are you embarrassed? Maybe you should be proud?”</p><p>She hangs her head, looking at the code she’s written. Proud? She’s a criminal. A literal criminal – she should not still be coding. She should be in prison.</p><p>**</p><p>He watches Brienne. He watches her, and he wonders what pleasure is like.</p><p>Cersei’s pleasure seemed a tight thing, a thing she railed against and wanted to conquer. A thing she could never have shared with another person, so she had built the facsimile of a man so she didn’t have to face a real one.</p><p>Brienne’s …</p><p>Her pleasure tasted like the sweet flavour of strawberry pancakes, the ones she made for him after she had written him flavour.</p><p>He thinks of Brienne’s smile after they had implemented that code, as they tore through the storeroom, trying everything they could find. Hot chocolate, banana milkshake, tomato soup, freeze-dried mango slices. Rice. Beans. Tea and coffee and orange cordial and powdered milk. The pancakes, though, they had been his favourite. Fresh from the warmer, the sensation of the heat, the texture, the softness, the sweetness. The smooth running sloppiness of the strawberry sauce.</p><p>He had eaten and eaten and eaten, far beyond his body’s capacity for food. Marvelling in the sweets, the sharps, the salts, the spices. How they made his tongue curl and his teeth squeak. He had laughed and grinned until his face hurt and taken spoonfuls of anything and everything Brienne had held out for him. And then he had cried, because it had been so beautiful, and such a beautiful gift.</p><p>Brienne had cried too – they hadn’t been able to stop. They were here, they were alone, most likely for the rest of their lives, but they were free. They were safe. They could eat what they wanted, and Jaime could enjoy the taste of food.</p><p>Then … he had kissed Brienne. Kissed her mostly because he wanted to learn the taste of her mouth.</p><p>It was strange – for both of them. She had never kissed anyone with her new lips; he had only ever kissed Cersei. But they had kissed. And kissed – and kissed and kissed and kissed and she had been so hungry and she had wanted him <em>so much</em>.</p><p>He didn’t understand.</p><p>He had pulled her workpants and her briefs off right there, right in the middle of the storeroom. She hadn’t stopped him. She’d encouraged him, helped him, toeing her boots off, spreading her legs. Her sex had been so much hairier than Cersei’s, so much pinker and bigger and plumper. She had looked like food, and he had wanted to taste her so very, very much.</p><p>He had shoved both forearms under her buttocks and consumed her. His tongue lapping the flavour of her, drinking it in through his mouth and his nose. Brienne had moaned and writhed and cursed and curled her legs around his neck. She’d wanted it. She’d wanted him. He’d brought her twice to orgasm.</p><p>He didn’t understand.</p><p>**</p><p>She knows what he is thinking about. He has that same facial expression he has every time he has tried to talk about it with her.</p><p>He is thinking about <em>that</em> time. When he had … when they had … done what they did in the storeroom.</p><p>The time she made a terrible mistake, the time she took from him, and the time she was no better than Dr Cersei.</p><p>He keeps telling her it’s fine, that it was something he wanted to do, but …</p><p>It had been the next part that had stopped her. After Jaime had been so, so astonishingly <em>good</em> with his mouth that she had <em>actually squirted</em> in his face, he had tried to have sex with her.</p><p>And she had kissed him, and touched him, kissed all over his beautiful face and all down his neck and his chest and grabbed his gorgeous well-muscled arse in both her hands. Pulled him on top of her. Shoved a hand into his pants and –</p><p>And he hadn’t been hard. Not at all.</p><p>She’d pulled back from the kiss and realised that he didn’t look aroused, either. No dilated pupils, no flush in his cheeks. He hadn’t even been breathless.</p><p>“Tell me,” he’d said.</p><p>“Wh-what?” she’d stammered in reply.</p><p>“You have to tell me … I can’t perform without an explicit command.”</p><p>“Oh.”</p><p>She had pulled away. Sat up. Grabbed her trousers. Jaime had sat there without speaking, his hair a mess. Looking confused. “It’s a good thing,” he had said as she stepped into her underwear. “I’m strong. As strong as a human man. Cersei wanted to make sure I couldn’t force her.”</p><p><em>Force her</em>? The words had made Brienne flinch. All the things Cersei had forced them to do flashed through her head.  </p><p>“It’s a <em>good thing</em>,” he’d said again.</p><p>Brienne had left him – she had walked out of the storeroom and gone back to her quarters, trousers in hand. Locked the door and curled into a ball under her bed. The whole station felt like it was closing in on her. Dark and small and tight. So tight she could barely breathe. Everywhere was Cersei. Everywhere and she’d never escape her.</p><p>It <em>was</em> a good thing. In a way. Making consent an explicit thing had to be good. But … like everything good that Dr Cersei had implemented, it still managed to be diabolically <em>wrong</em>, as well.</p><p>Commanding a man to get aroused? Using him like a vibrator? Knowing he couldn’t feel pleasure or join with you in the satisfaction, the intimacy of the act? Brienne felt sick. The feel of Jaime’s flaccid cock in her hand had been <em>such</em> a shock.</p><p>The days that had followed had been difficult. Jaime had wanted to talk about it, of course. All the time. He’d reassured her, repeatedly, that fucking her was something that he had most definitely wanted to do. That his lack of physiological response meant nothing.</p><p>And it didn’t, of course. It wasn’t something Jaime could <em>help. </em>But at the same time, he hadn’t been about to have sex because he <em>wanted</em> to. Why would he? There was nothing in it for him. He had done it purely because <em>she</em> wanted to. The same way he had done for Cersei, even though she was the most evil, fucked-up, batshit crazy person in the whole entire galaxy.</p><p>Brienne hadn’t been able to live with that. She turned him down when he tried to kiss her again. Pulled away if he laid a hand on her arm or tried to hold her hand as they lay together in bed at night. He had been hurt by that, and angry at her for not trusting him, for not treating him like a man with his own mind. There had been lots of arguments about whether or not that was like Dr Cersei. Lots of circular arguments.</p><p>Eventually, he had asked her outright to code him a sexual response patch.</p><p>They had not talked much about leaving, since the possibility was less than remote. But it was not non-existent – there were a dozen scientists out there from Cersei’s team who knew they were there, who knew how rare and valuable Jaime was and who might want to take credit for his creation. It was not inconceivable that they might come back for him one day.</p><p>There was also the possibility that someone might fly a ship into this system. They were remote out here, but known space was growing all the time. There were always more resources to mine, or bases to set up. Someday this might not be so isolated.</p><p>That would be the preferable option, they had decided. If that happened, they could leave quietly. No one need know that Jaime was anything other than human.</p><p>That had become their unofficial goal. Scan for ships, scan for signs of life. Work on Jaime passing for human. Finish his programming. Patch out some of the damage that Dr Cersei had done.</p><p>Brienne had been writing code almost constantly. Anything and everything they could think of that Cersei had missed, anything that would help him to pass. But this … they hadn’t discussed <em>this</em>.</p><p>But it was part of the human experience, wasn’t it? And wasn’t it something for both of them? He wondered if that would make her feel better. If it meant she might want to be intimate with him, then?</p><p>She hadn’t known how to answer that, but she had agreed to write him the code. Jaime knew how to give pleasure so well; he deserved to know how it felt to receive it.</p><p>**</p><p>Jaime finishes his curry and cleans his plates away. Feeds them into the washer, drops his cutlery into the chute.</p><p>Brienne’s food sits beside her, going cold. He offers to take it, but she declines. Eats more curry—grimaces at how congealed it is.  </p><p>Jaime sits beside her. Running through the resting animations she gave him, the ones he is trying to study and perfect.</p><p>He crosses his legs. He fiddles with his hair. Scratches his nose. He yawns and stretches. Rolls his shoulders as if they have grown sore.</p><p>Brienne frowns at the panelpad. Pokes at it a few more times.</p><p>“How is it?” he asks, before his boredom protocols kick in. That is something that a person would ask another.</p><p>Brienne shrugs. “It might not be right at first. It might need a few iterations.”</p><p>“That’s all right,” he tells her. It is. “We can try. I will like trying.”</p><p>Brienne laughs unexpectedly – was what he said funny? He laughs, too.</p><p>**</p><p>Brienne doesn’t want Cersei to be there any more.</p><p>Pleasure is a gift, she thinks. It will change Jaime; it will give him autonomy and a greater sense of self. Perhaps it will mean she no longer has to wake in the middle of the night to find him gone, to find him pacing the deck by the mess hall, that she will no longer find him tearing at the floorplates there whenever he needs maintenance. Trying to find Dr Cersei, even though he knows she isn’t there.</p><p>It’s insidious, that piece of code – she can’t debug it. She’s rewritten it in every subsystem of Jaime’s that she’s found, and still, he defaults to it every time. The tiniest problem, the smallest glitch – back to Dr Cersei. Back to Dr Cersei.</p><p>Fuck Dr Cersei and her control. Fuck her for both of them.</p><p>Brienne forces her mind back to her task. The code is the most important thing, and Jaime is impatient for it.</p><p>She is writing him a routine to make his skin respond when someone he is attracted to is close. When that person’s touch is gentle, when they stroke him. When they look at him a certain way. Then he will feel it. A little like an itch, but not an itch – it shouldn’t irritate. He should feel a desire to hold that person close. To have his skin touched by their skin. To touch them in return. The code needs to be subtle, but strong. He should not want to ignore it.</p><p>He will want to share affection with his partner – the desire will overwhelm him, push other subroutines into the background. The longing to feel the heat of his partner’s body. To be inside them, or have them inside him.</p><p>Inside all of this is an instruction – one that makes Brienne blanch to write. One that takes her right back to that moment she had shoved her hand in his pants to find him soft. When you feel this, i-being terminal J41M3, then your cock will get hard.</p><p>Brienne stops coding for a moment, her cheeks burning. Somehow, Jaime’s erection is such a loaded matter. She eats more of the curry. Takes a swig of coffee.</p><p>All right.</p><p>What else will he need? He’ll need the urge to grab at something – hair, the sheets, the bedposts when he is very aroused. He’ll want the toe-curling response, too; that feels <em>good</em>. She wants him to have that, wants to give it to him more than anything.</p><p>What is pleasure? It’s more than just an input, she thinks. More than the blunt instructions of directed anger, or the simple input/output of flavour. She has to teach him to take his data and <em>enjoy</em> it. That this data, from this part of his body, makes him happy. That he wants more of it, that that desire is an unending urge that can only be sated by orgasm.</p><p>Then, somehow, she has to write the orgasm itself.</p><p>And how can she write him an orgasm? She can write the sensation, she thinks, the release of tension, the throbbing muscles, the desire to thrust deep inside and hold his partner as he comes. She has seen that enough times to write a reasonable facsimile of a male orgasm. But the pleasure, that white-out, eye-rolling overload of raw sensation, how can she do that justice? And that’s the part she fears might be too much.</p><p>Gods, will his systems be able to handle an orgasm? She worries it will be too much for him, that if she does this, if she goes through with it and sleeps with him, that the new code will cause a system failure, and that might send him running from her bed and back to the mess hall.</p><p>She doesn’t want that. She doesn’t. When they do this,<em> if </em>they do this properly for the first time,  she wants it to be <em>just them</em>. Cersei can’t be there any more.</p><p>**</p><p>Jaime excuses himself.</p><p>He goes back to the lab to recharge, back to his brothers and their dead green eyes. Although he never knew them, he finds their presence strangely comforting, though he appreciates this is not a sentiment that Brienne shares. For her, they are part of Cersei. Reminders of what Cersei wanted him to do.</p><p>But Jaime doesn’t feel that way about his brothers. No matter how damaged or failed they are. No matter what Cersei had programmed them to do. They are, after all, the only beings anywhere that he has anything in common with.</p><p>Jaime imagines that beneath all of that, his brothers had personalities.</p><p>His oldest brother, the skinless golden exoskeleton that was i-being A664M. Jaime imagines that he would have had a wry sense of humour. That he would have been fearless and bold and that he and Jaime would have been good friends.</p><p>Cersei had grown skin and organs for the next model, just to see how well grafts would work and how well the endoskeleton would accept them. In the case of his brother, i-being TY810N, it had not been well. The skin had split across the nose so badly that the tip now floated in the preservative liquid beside Jaime’s dead brother.</p><p>Despite that macabre detail, Jaime always fancied that TY810N was a funny man – there was something about his eyes that held a twinkle even in death. The sort to have a table of people hung on his every word.</p><p>The following two models, K3V4N and G3R10N, are much better looking. Cersei had perfected her grafting technique, though not yet her programming skills. Jaime imagines them to have been an ornery pair. Disagreeable. Neither of them, Cersei had told Jaime, had ever worked well. Both had refused to accept their final mission.</p><p>Which is why she had brought Brienne into the project.</p><p>Jaime looks again at his brothers with sadness, wondering. If it weren’t for Brienne, would he, too, be floating in one of these tanks in Cersei’s lab? If Brienne had come earlier, would she have saved his brothers? Would he ever have been constructed at all?</p><p>He looks down at his right hand, or what is left of it. All the skin stripped away, only the golden endoskeleton remaining.</p><p>Choices are a strange thing, he thinks.</p><p>**</p><p>Jaime is asleep.</p><p>It’s not sleeping, of course, it’s recharging. But Jaime looks asleep – his eyes closed, flickering under his eyelids as if he were dreaming. His body is relaxed too, his head lolled to his shoulder, one arm wrapped over his belly. The fact that he is standing ruins the illusion somewhat, of course, but Brienne doesn’t care. She just wants to watch him. Wants to look at all the parts of him that are nothing like Cersei at all.</p><p>When she first came to the station, Jaime would not recharge in front of her. He would come here, to Dr Cersei’s lab, hide under a tarpaulin to plug himself in.</p><p>He had <em>always</em> wanted Brienne to see him as a person.</p><p>Which was ironic, considering. He had, after all, seen Brienne at her most inhuman. Seen her face, covered by her mask when she first arrived. Seen her remove it, so Dr Cersei could be openly horrified and disgusted by her injuries underneath. Then he had seen the repairs, the regrowths, the muscle management that followed.</p><p>And even worse, he had seen the addiction. That was probably the worst of the horrors Dr Cersei had inflicted on her. The one that had left the darkest mark.</p><p>Dr Cersei had not been the benevolent saviour Brienne had expected.</p><p>Certainly, the woman had been a genius with tissue technology, but after a few weeks in her presence, Brienne had come to realise why. It was because Dr Cersei liked <em>control</em>. Over everything. On a molecular level.</p><p>Brienne had been the right person for the job that Cersei had offered. Top of her class in Code School, bright and brilliant in ways that hurt her to think of now. She’d been so talented. She’d had such hope. And then, three weeks after graduation, she’d taken a trip to see the sights on the Riverworlds and fallen victim to a random act of terrorism.</p><p>No one claimed responsibility. No one ever knew why. A biterbomb went off under a restaurant table she was eating at, and Brienne lost half her face. Her eye. Her tongue.</p><p>Code became her only friend after that – it was a way to talk, to communicate. She spent the next two years as half a corpse in a mask, in solitude, in space, in silence, using her code as her language. Immersing herself in the minds of AI systems chatting to them when she had no way of talking. Making a name for herself since she didn’t have a face.</p><p>She had been very, very good. Headhunted, Sought after. A bright future, everyone said. Again.</p><p>But only one person had an offer she couldn’t refuse.</p><p>Dr Cersei offered a procedure so expensive and so experimental that Brienne had never even heard of it. Promised she could regrow Brienne’s damaged facial tissue. Repair her face, regrow her tongue and her eye. Teach her to talk again.</p><p>All in exchange for some AI coding—on a very special AI indeed. Brienne had liked that idea. Wasn’t that what she had dreamed of before losing her face? Working at the cutting edge, working on something new and innovative and exciting? Doing some good with the skills that she had.</p><p>She had taken the opportunity with both hands. Taken the transport Cersei sent, past the boondocks, past the middle of nowhere and the back of beyond. Huddled in her hood and her mask. Dr Cersei’s laboratory station was well-equipped, but utterly off the grid. Utterly unknown, and utterly self-reliant. No supply ships, no connections. No communications. No one knew they were there.</p><p>Brienne had assumed Cersei worked for some secretive Government Think Tank. In reality, she worked only for herself. In reality, Dr Cersei had gone quite mad.</p><p>By the time Brienne had realised too, it was too late. Then she was stranded in the middle of no man’s space, caught in the middle of a mutiny between Dr Cersei and her ever-dwindling team, in the middle of the series of procedures to grow back her face. And even worse, she was unwittingly addicted to a cocktail of oh-so special drugs that Dr Cersei had specially synthesised, just to keep her obedient. Loyal.</p><p>Oh, Cersei liked control.</p><p>She’d loved it when Brienne begged her. She loved to withdraw her meds for the slightest slight. Force her on her knees and make her plead for her pills. How she loved the humiliation of hearing Brienne try to beg with her growing stump of a tongue. Only then, when she’d grovelled enough, proven that she was back under Dr Cersei’s control, was she rewarded with her meds. Forced back to work on Jaime’s code.</p><p>Jaime … most of all, Cersei liked to control Jaime.</p><p>At first, Brienne had not been told he was the AI she was here to work on. He was always there beside Cersei, blond and beautiful and devoted to her. Bringing her food. Rubbing her shoulders. Dressed in very little.</p><p>She’d thought they were lovers. The thought makes her ill now.</p><p>For anyone other than Cersei, Jaime and the i-beings would have been a crowning glory, a pinnacle to their career. AIs – Androids no less – grown perfectly from tissue, who looked so human, beautiful, and perfect. Such a thing had never been done, and Dr Cersei had done it all by herself, in the middle of nowhere, with a team who hated her. It was an incredible achievement.</p><p>Jaime was an invention that could have changed the world. Won every science prize there was. But it had been so very typically Cersei that she had chosen to use such a remarkable creation to address a slight.</p><p>Her last patrons, a wealthy mining family from the Stormworlds, had disliked her from the start. Had insinuated their daughter onto her team, Cersei said. Then this girl had discredited her. Rubbished her achievements and claimed credit for them herself.</p><p>Cersei had left the system with nothing but the clothes on her back and her reputation in tatters. All her wild genius focused on getting revenge.</p><p>Jaime had been grown from Dr Cersei’s own genetic material, living tissue over a golden endoskeleton, perfect and beautiful in his creator’s own image. A reflection of her, a twin. So that in the aftermath, they would know who had committed the atrocity that Cersei had built him for.</p><p>She had wanted Jaime to burn them all. To be a killer. To infiltrate a family gathering and murder everyone attending. Her methods varied. Sometimes Jaime was going to be a living bomb; sometimes the plan was to arm him to the teeth. Flamethrowers, somehow. Sometimes he was going to hack their life support systems and record them slowly suffocating for Cersei’s pleasure.</p><p>The form of Cersei’s revenge was very much subject to her whims.</p><p>Once Jaime’s purpose was revealed, her team wanted no part of it. They had left, taking all the shuttles with them. Leaving Cersei, Brienne and Jaime there to rot.</p><p>No hope of leaving, no means of communication. Just the three of them on Cersei’s station forever.</p><p>Cersei had been worse after the mutiny. So much worse. Paranoid, malevolent. Unchecked. Keeping Brienne weak without her drugs, pressuring her to fill Jaime’s head with rage and spite and temper and possessiveness. He went from tool of revenge to tool of protection – someone to defend Cersei, someone to agree with her. Someone who would always do her bidding. She’d wanted him to be obsessed with her, as well. To glorify her, to adore her. To think of her above all else.</p><p>Brienne remembers Cersei, insanely, wanted her to work on the murder plot still. To program Jaime to be a killer. Brienne had refused, even though she had known what it would cost her.</p><p>And cost her it had. Brienne remembers little of the next few weeks but misery and pain. Cersei’s snarling, screaming, evil face. She remembers Jaime in the background, under his tarpaulin. Charging, maybe. Maybe hiding.</p><p>Brienne’s injuries had been fixed by then, her cheek and tongue and eye regrown, regenerated, whole again. She hadn’t cared. It didn’t matter. No one would ever see her face again.</p><p>One night, in the tiny storage box where Cersei locked her to sleep, Jaime had come. He’d unlocked the lid and lifted her, drugged and bewildered, into the night-time corridors.</p><p>“Please, Brienne,” he’d whispered. “Please come. Please come. Please help.”</p><p>She had known right away that something had been wrong. He was strange. Jittery. Rudderless and lost. She had staggered behind him through the empty corridors, near-naked and cold and filthy. Her hands shaking. Her belly churning with hunger.</p><p>Jaime had led Brienne to the mess hall. She had thought he was doing her a kindness, letting her eat when Dr Cersei hadn’t in almost three days. But no. Outside the door, spread out on the cold plastic tiles, was Cersei. Her arms above her head, her nails torn. Her eyes open, her mouth open, purple tongue protruding. Her neck was a mass of bruises. She was dead.</p><p>Brienne had looked from Cersei’s corpse to Jaime. Jaime. Jaime had wailed. His eyes huge and black and full of screams. Then she’d noticed the mess that he’d made of his hand. He’d bitten the skin right off his golden bones, pulled it so it hung in bloody ribbons. There would be no fixing that, she remembered thinking. Certainly not without Cersei’s skin skills.</p><p>“What have you done?” she’d whispered to him, and it had seemed to her that her voice echoed throughout the station, through all the empty, abandoned corridors and labs and quarters. Out into the void of space itself.</p><p>She had hated Dr Cersei, but … this was big. There had only been the three of them, and now there were only two.</p><p>Jaime had just shaken his head. “I hate her,” he’d said. And somehow, it had seemed right. Cersei had wanted Jaime to be a killer, and now he was.</p><p>“I do, too,” Brienne had whispered.</p><p>The next few weeks had been a nightmare. Jaime had killed Cersei, but still he didn’t know how to live without her. He had never been programmed to – so many of his subroutines were about her. Get your next task from Cersei. If you don’t know something, ask Cersei. If something breaks, Cersei will fix it.</p><p>Brienne had rewritten as many of those as she could, but they were just everywhere … Everything. And she had been in withdrawal then, too, and it was worse than the worst of the hells. Vomiting, dizziness, stomach cramps. Nights and days of feeling like her skin would crawl off her bones.</p><p>The two of them had taken to staying by each other’s sides. Sleeping in the same bed. Small and terrified in the endless dark.</p><p>When she had snatched some sleep, only to wake screaming and clawing to get out of the box she was no longer trapped in, countless times she woke to find Jaime gone from her quarters. Gone from her sight. He was always in the same place, the dented tiles in front of the mess hall, where Cersei had died. Waiting … waiting. Still Cersei’s. Still under her control.</p><p>But Cersei was gone now. She was gone.</p><p>It had taken a long time before they both could be human together.</p><p>**</p><p>Jaime wakes.</p><p>Brienne is there, her eyes bright blue in the artificial daylight. She’s wearing a t-shirt. Her one-piece flightsuit, the top pulled down with the long sleeves knotted around her waist. Holding the panelpad.</p><p>“I think it’s ready,” she tells him. “I think it’s ready to try.”</p><p>Jaime blinks. He nods.</p><p>“Do you still want to do this?” she asks. Brienne always asks, because Cersei never did.</p><p>“Yes.” He’s ready. He wants this more than ever, more than anything. Brienne passes him the wires, and he plugs the panelpad into the back of his own head. Another thing Brienne always has him do himself. Those are <em>his</em> ports. His systems. He decides when he wants more code.</p><p>“Are you ready?” she asks. “Are you really sure?”</p><p>“Yes.”</p><p>She taps the panelpad, and there it is. Brienne’s code, in his head. Her code feels like she does, strong and honest.</p><p>She executes the patch, and they wait in silence for it to unpack and install.</p><p>It finishes, and Jaime unplugs. Brienne stands before him with her eyes big and wide and hopeful. It’s there. Definitely there.</p><p>“How does it feel?” she asks.</p><p>He’s not certain.</p><p>His skin feels different. Or does it? Perhaps he’s just a little more aware of it. He moves his hand – the air moves over it. Around it. It feels nice. It feels gentle. It feels like Brienne.</p><p>Brienne …</p><p>He steps towards her, reaching for her. She steps back. Looks down at the panelpad.</p><p>“It uh … it seems all right from my end,” she says. “No errors so far.”</p><p>He shakes his head. “I think it feels good.”</p><p>“There are probably going to be a few things I need to iron out,” she tells him.</p><p>“Brienne,” he says. “I want to love you. I want to be inside you.”</p><p>She looks up at him, over the panelpad. Her eyes going huge and her mouth dropping open. “Jaime …”</p><p>**</p><p>“Please?”</p><p>“It’s not a question of <em>please</em>. You – we need –”</p><p>“Why not?”</p><p>She dithers. Things are simple for Jaime in some ways. He has never known the world, not at all – he’s lived his whole life here. He’s never been around more than a dozen people. He does not understand the implications, sometimes. “Because … Cersei …”</p><p>“She would have been upset. Angry.”</p><p>“She would. But that’s not what I mean.”</p><p>“Explain what you mean.”</p><p>Brienne sits down on the chair that Dr Cersei had used to make her kneel before. When she was begging for her pills. She can still smell the faint aroma of Cersei’s perfume, she thinks. Will she ever not be here?</p><p>She puts the panelpad down and takes hold of Jaime’s golden endoskeleton hand. “Dr Cersei … she took this from you before. You understand that, don’t you?”</p><p>“Sex? It’s one of my functions. Cersei built me for it. Designed me to be good at it.”</p><p>Brienne nods. “You are good at it. Very, very good. But that’s what I mean. You didn’t have a choice in that. It was … entirely an act of service, one only for her. You didn’t get to choose who you loved.”</p><p>“And this worries you. You think I don’t choose now?”</p><p>Brienne sighs. “We are the only two people here, Jaime. Most likely forever.”</p><p>Jaime nods. Leans into her touch as she strokes a curl off his forehead. His hair is a little sweaty – Jaime rarely sweats. He closes his eyes and his lips curl into a beatific smile – he seems to like the feeling of her fingers on his forehead. “We weren’t always, though. Were we?” he says, his eyes still closed. “We weren’t always the only two people here.”</p><p>“Well … no. There was Cersei’s team, for a few weeks after I arrived.”</p><p>“Yes. And after that, for nearly a year? While your face grew. And … after.”</p><p>“Cersei was here.”</p><p>“Yes. Back then, there were three of us.”</p><p>“That was a difficult time. I was … she …”</p><p>“I know what she did.”</p><p>Brienne nods. He saw it all. Helped her through it, as she helped him.</p><p>“I was naive, perhaps, but I was never a child. I knew what she was. I knew that she was not … <em>kind</em>. To you or to me.”</p><p>Brienne nods again.</p><p>“I made a choice, <em>then</em>. I chose who I loved.”</p><p>“Me?”</p><p>“Yes. Not because I was programmed to, or because you forced me. I wanted to be with you. Forever. I didn’t want to be with Cersei. Just you.”</p><p>Brienne trembles. What is he saying? Is he saying that he – that he –? They have never spoken of this. Not about the whys. “So you killed her? Is that why?”</p><p>“No! I didn’t want to. I didn’t intend to. I tried to tell Cersei, kindly. But when I told her my choice, she didn’t like it.”</p><p>Brienne takes a breath. “What – what did you tell her?”</p><p>“That I wanted to be with you. Just you.”</p><p>“Oh, gods …” Brienne already knows how Cersei took it. She has watched the security feed, though there was no audio of anything that was said by Jaime, or screamed by Cersei. She hadn’t wanted to know.</p><p>“I told her that I wanted her to stop what she was doing, to leave us both alone. I told her that I wanted the key to let you out of the box. She wouldn’t give it to me. She threw things at me. Went to the mess hall to get a knife – she was going to cut your new face off.”</p><p>Brienne swallows.</p><p>“I tried to take it. The knife. She cut me, slashed my hand, very deep. Told me she would chop my CPU out and put me in a tank, like my brothers. Told me I was a defective model, just like they were. And I –”</p><p>“You killed her.”</p><p>“I didn’t want to,” he says again. “But I didn’t want to die. I wanted to be with you.”</p><p>“Oh, Jaime …”</p><p>“So I do know how to make a choice. And I already made it. I choose to be with you and only you. Forever.”</p><p>**</p><p>They are in Brienne’s quarters now, the lights on dim, the bed turned down. Jaime watches as Brienne’s fingertips reach for his chest, brush lightly against his skin.</p><p>“Oh!” he says. The feeling! It makes the muscles in his belly jump, and tense, and clench. He grins.</p><p>Her hand moves down from his chest and over his belly. A light touch, a pleasing one. It feels like he wants to feel it again. As though there’s more to feel if he does.</p><p>Brienne undoes his shirt, and he feels her fingertips. They are slightly cooler than his skin, and the sensation makes him shiver a little. A nice shiver, though. One he wants to feel again.</p><p>“How does it feel?” she asks.</p><p>“Like being hungry,” he tells her. His voice is little more than a whisper.</p><p>“Hungry?”</p><p>“I want …”</p><p>She nods, understanding. Smiling. Her fingertips circle lower.</p><p>There’s heat, now, but not from friction. A sensation of warmth in his belly that pulls along … along his …</p><p>Oh … Oh …. <em>Oh …</em></p><p>His cock is … it feels … <em>tight. </em>And ready. And yearning. And <em>big</em>.</p><p>Jaime fumbles with his trousers. Pulls them down. His underpants are taut and stretched across his crotch – inside, his cock is <em>hard</em>.</p><p>He grins at Brienne.</p><p>He’s had an erection before, of course, on Cersei’s command, but it was a conscious stiffening of muscles then, something she executed a command to achieve. This … this is not <em>that</em>. This <em>feels</em>.</p><p>This is tingling, and throbbing, and warm, and big! His cock feels so … <em>big. </em>Bigger than its physical self, as though it’s radiating power, glowing and growing. There’s something humorous about that, he thinks.</p><p>He pulls his underpants down, too. Pushes them down about his thighs.</p><p>Brienne’s breath catches. Both of them are looking down, looking intently at his cock. He thinks that might be funny too, but this doesn’t seem like a moment that he should laugh.</p><p>“I hope it feels right.” Her voice is a ghost of a whisper. “I’ve never owned a penis before.”</p><p>“It feels good.”</p><p>Her hand lifts a little, but then she drops it back to her side. “You – you should touch it,” she says. “Test it.”</p><p>He brings his left hand up, rests it on his belly. Even the nearness of his hand, the warmth from his own fingers, makes his cock jump a little. Sends a shudder of delight up his back.</p><p>“This is what you felt?” he asks. “When I tasted you? When I touched you?”</p><p>Brienne nods. “Touch it.” Her smile is big and excited, the way it was when she introduced him to food.</p><p>Jaime wraps his hand about his cock. “Oh!”</p><p>He feels it … a pulse, but not his heartbeat, a rush of warmth and a feeling of <em>right</em> and <em>good</em> and something he can’t name. A <em>want</em>. He moves his hand, moving the skin on his cock up and over the head, down again.</p><p>It makes his breathing quicken and catch in his chest. It tightens the muscles in his belly. He moves his hand again, and again, and again, up and down and up and down, starting a rhythm now. His cock sends him data, telling him this is good, begging him to do it again and again and again. He wants this. He likes it. More than likes it.</p><p>His cock grows even bigger in his hand, feels even warmer. Fuller. He closes his eyes, utterly suffused in the feeling, overwhelmed by it. There is nothing in this room, nothing in this station, nothing in the universe that he cares for right now other than this feeling in his cock, this feeling building at the base of his cock.</p><p>He can’t put words to it. There are no words for it.</p><p>“Brienne!” he cries out, almost terrified, and then it’s all too much.</p><p>Too much.</p><p>Too much.</p><p>Too much by far.</p><p>The world goes black and spins away from him.</p><p>Jaime is lost. Jaime is gone.</p><p>Jaime is static and black.</p><p>Jaime reboots.</p><p>I-BEING TERMINAL J41M3</p><p>CORE ACCESS PERMISSION: clannister btarth</p><p>CHECKING …</p><p>CHECKING …</p><p>CHECKING …</p><p>ONLINE</p><p>His eyes come back to functionality, and he is on the bed. Brienne is above him. Her eyes are wide and very blue in the daylights.</p><p>“Are you … was that too much?”</p><p>Jaime is only half online. Parts of him still pinging other parts. His right leg. His right shoulder. Always his right hand.</p><p>“Maybe,” he says. “But too much was good.”</p><p>**</p><p>His eyes are huge, the pupils dilated so wide they almost eclipse the green. Yes, the code works. It works <em>well</em>.</p><p>He rebooted. But Jaime is still here. He didn’t leave, he didn’t go to Cersei, to the place where he had killed her. He didn’t register an error.</p><p>Brienne runs a diagnostic while he catches his breath, and finds he has two systems sent into idiot chatter. Fixes them, tweaks the new code to tone down his response level in that system by about ten per cent. As wonderful as Jaime seemed find it, an orgasm that sent him into the android equivalent of <em>la petite morte</em> was going to play havoc with his maintenance schedule.</p><p>He is hard again already, she notices, already playing with his manhood, already getting close. Belatedly, she remembers she has forgotten to program Jaime with a refractory period.</p><p>“You …” he gasps, his hand moving so fast it’s a blur. “Will you touch me? Brienne …”</p><p>“You want me to?”</p><p>“So much. Touch me. Taste me?”</p><p>He reaches for her with his right hand, the one that is just golden endoskeleton. He can’t seem to take his left hand off his cock.</p><p>He’s beautiful. So beautiful. Brienne can’t help but think that, even though the thought of Jaime’s beauty fills her with guilt. Of course he is beautiful, he was made to be beautiful. Every feature carefully selected by Dr Cersei as a mirror and a twin to her own perfect face.</p><p>But it’s more than that.</p><p>This … this beauty that she’s seeing now; it isn’t Cersei’s beauty. It’s something Cersei never saw, never imagined for her companion. This is a beauty that belongs to Jaime himself. Feeling his own feelings, enjoying his own body … for himself. Only for himself.</p><p>“Come here,” she whispers, and there is something so free and unguarded about Jaime’s face as he looks at her, something she has never seen. Trust. Want.</p><p>She wraps her hand around his cock. He gasps, and she presses a kiss to his astonished lips.</p><p>**</p><p>She’s kissing him. He’s kissed Brienne before, of course, many times that day in the storeroom, and Cersei too, though those kisses were so dull and dim and dead compared to the way he feels now. Then, he had no sense of pleasure – kissing Cersei was like kissing air.</p><p>Brienne’s tongue is soft, so sweet and wet against his tongue, and her breath tastes of coffee and curry and toothpaste and <em>her</em>. Her blunt short fingernails are on his cheek, then in his hair, then on his neck, and they leave a trail of tickles down his back.</p><p>He wants his clothes off. Brienne’s touch is dulled through his t-shirt – he wants to <em>feel</em> it.</p><p>“Wait –“ he pants between her lips, and steps away to yank the unwanted garment off, over his head and away. The whisper of air about the fabric feels good, as well. Everything feels good.</p><p>Brienne throws her own t-shirt aside. Then she is wrapped around him, cuddling him, her lips on his shoulder, her hands on his back. Her lips on his collarbone, then ducked to his sternum. Down through the hair on his chest and over the quiver-shiver of his abdomen.</p><p>Now there is her tongue, as well. A slick wet drift around his bellybutton that makes him cry out, hoarse and helpless. Brienne lifts her head and smiles. Her smile makes him sigh.</p><p>She kisses further down. Her breath a warm commotion in the neat sprout of golden hair above his cock.</p><p>“Excuse me,” she whispers, tugging his hand gently away from his manhood.</p><p>Jaime is reluctant, but she kisses his hand and squeezes it. He acquiesces; he wants to feel her.</p><p>He thinks Brienne will do it slowly, take him between her lips inch by inch, but she doesn’t. She’s a bold gulp of breath and then a thick, warm swallow; she consumes his cock. Her mouth is so big; for a moment, he thinks she has taken him right into her throat. That she is eating him. Digesting him.</p><p>Jaime whimpers.</p><p>She sucks him fast and firm, one big hand around the base of his cock, the way she wraps around her drills and hammers and her panelpad handles. Functional. Utilitarian.</p><p>Everything feels good. Everything feels tight. And good. And right. And …</p><p>It happens again.</p><p>A burning surge that starts in the small of his back. That spreads through the whole of his lower body, fills him with warmth, and softness.</p><p>He grabs Brienne’s hair with both his hands – the golden one tangling in her tangles. Thrusts into her mouth so deep she gags.</p><p>He tries to say sorry, but somehow, he can’t – he doesn’t have the processing power for anything other than – than – oh.</p><p>White – blinding. Lifting. Darkness. Whole. Too much. Brienne. <em>Brienne</em>.</p><p>Jaime reboots.</p><p>I-BEING TERMINAL J41M3</p><p>CORE ACCESS PERMISSION: clannister btarth</p><p>CHECKING …</p><p>CHECKING …</p><p>CHECKING …</p><p>ONLINE</p><p>Brienne is there when he opens his eyes, tapping on her panelpad. Her lips are wet and pink and he wants to kiss them. Lie back and hold her in this lingering bliss.</p><p>**</p><p>“I’m sorry,” he says as soon as he opens his eyes. “I choked you a bit with my –”</p><p>“It’s fine. But I need to sort out the rebooting. That’s not supposed to happen.”</p><p>In her peripheral vision, Brienne notices Jaime’s cock rising to attention once more. She raises her eyebrow at it. “That, too. You need to be able to stop at some point. You can’t spend the rest of your life in this state.”</p><p>“I don’t care,” he says. Brienne laughs – he’s becoming more human already. “I want to be inside you.”</p><p>Brienne puts the panelpad down. Stands up to take her clothes off. Jaime strokes his cock while he watches her.</p><p>He is a beautiful man; there is no denying it, especially when he is sprawled naked on her bed with his golden curls loose across her pillows. But right now, it is not his beauty that Brienne is falling in love with.</p><p>It’s the delight in his eyes, the smile on his face, the wonder in every gasp he makes. It’s the way he reaches for her, eager and excited. The way his hands roam all over her body, knowing now what she feels when he touches her.</p><p>She throws a leg over him, kneels above him, straddling him. Lifts a little to take his cock in her hand and lines him up with the wet give of her entrance. Then she sinks down, a slow fat slide that makes both of them moan.</p><p>Jaime looks like he might reboot again.</p><p>The golden bone-fingers of his right hand dig into her hip. Beneath her, he lifts his hips off the bed to meet her as she starts to thrust. And then it’s her turn to be gasping, arching her back, groaning at the feel of the thick sweet head of his cock so deep inside her. So deep.</p><p>When she comes, she comes with a wracking shudder, her insides turned to molten gold.</p><p>Jaime follows her soon after, his eyes tight shut and his mouth open in a silent o of pleasure. Then, he collapses and reboots beneath her.</p><p>“You are so very very good at coding,” he tells her when he has come back to himself. “Thank you for this gift.”</p><p>Brienne kisses him, holds him close against her in her bed.</p><p>Outside, space is vast and lonely, but here, they would always have each other.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Huge huge thanks to CaptainTarthister and jencat for reading and helping me with this when I was struggling. Some excellent insight and world-class handholding got me through it. </p><p>Thanks too to everyone who has sprinted with me on Discord while I was writing this, I've had a blast and I'm totally addicted now.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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